For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.
For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.
The Scripture referred to can be no other than the stringent and remarkable ordinance regarding the Paschal Lamb, that a bone of it should not be broken (Exodus 12:46; Numbers 9:12). And if so, we have this apostle as well as Paul (1 Corinthians 5:7), holding forth the Paschal Lamb as a typical foreshadowing of "the Lamb of God." There indeed in Psalms 34:1-22 a verse which some-regarding it as Messianic-have thought to the passage referred to by the Evangelist: "He keepeth all his bones; not one of them is broken" (Psalms 34:20). But that is rather a definite way of expressing the minute care with which God watches over His people in the body; and the right view of its bearing on Christ is to mark how congruous it was that that should be literally realized in Him which was designed but generally to express the safety of all His saints. But we shall miss one of the most august designs of God in the suffer ings of His Son if we rest here. Up to the moment of His death, every imaginable indignity had been permitted to be done to the sacred body of the Lord Jesus-as if, so long as the Sacrifice was incomplete, the Lord, who had laid upon Him the iniquity of us all, would not interpose. But no sooner has He "finished" the work given Him to do than an Unseen Hand is found to have provided against the clubs of the rude soldiers coming in contact with that Temple of the Godhead. Very different from such violence was that spear-thrust, for which not only doubting Thomas would thank the soldier, but intelligent believers in every age, to whom the certainty of their Lord's death and resurrection is the life of their whole Christianity.